Introduction to Survival Analysis in the Presence of Competing Risks

Survival analysis is often used in studies of clinical epidemiology, but the existence of competing risks has not been adequately considered. Competing risks may hinder observation of the outcome of interest or modify the occurrence of the outcome. In the presence of competing risks, conventional survival analysis leads to biased results. To conduct a survival analysis in the presence of competing risks, researchers should select an appropriate method from the following two options: cause-specific hazard model and subdistribution hazard model. This article explains the issues raised by the presence of competing risks and describes methods to account for competing risks in survival analysis.